More recently, too, anti-immigrant sentiment has played a central role in Europe's parties of the Far Right, such as France's National Front (now the National Rally), Alternative for Germany, the Swiss People's Party, Hungary's Fidesz, the Party of Freedom of the Netherlands, the Brothers of Italy, and numerous others of their stripe. Meanwhile, in the United States, anti-immigrant sentiment has thrived in the increasingly right-wing Republican Party. Trump's adoption of an anti-immigrant approach as a central theme of his MAGA movement, like his promise of building a wall between Mexico and the United States, is no accident, but part of a political strategy to ride xenophobia to power.
A key reason that nativism has become a staple of the Right is that, with the advent of democratic institutions in many nations, the Right has faced a difficult situation. Before the commoners gained the vote, their opportunities for effectively challenging economic and social inequality were limited. But, armed with the ballot, masses of people had the power to elect governments that would implement more equitable policies, such as sharing the wealth. This could be accomplished in a variety of ways, including taking control of giant corporations and estates, heavily taxing vast fortunes, raising workers' pay, reducing the workday and lengthening vacations, building inexpensive housing, and establishing free education and healthcare. Worst of all, from the standpoint of the Right, such leveling measures, advanced by a burgeoning Left, had significant popular appeal.
Faced with this dilemma, the economically and socially privileged and their political parties on the Right recognized that, to defeat the drive for the expansion of economic and social equality, it would be useful to fan the flames of popular prejudices (among them, hostility to immigrants), as this would divide the mass base of the Left and put it on the defensive. Consequently, they gravitated toward this divide and conquer strategy-- a strategy that sometimes worked.
Will it work again in the 2024 U.S. presidential and congressional elections? With the poll numbers so close, it's hard to say.
Meanwhile, though, it's worth noting how ironic it is that, in the United States-- a nation populated almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants-- anti-immigrant sentiment, whipped up by Trump and Vance, has once again come to the forefront of American politics.
Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
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